VMware vSphere Reviews

We use VMware vSphere for virtualization, especially server virtualization.

It's a very useful solution. It's easy to set up, and it's pretty stable.

It could be more scalable. 

I have been using VMware vSphere for about ten years.

VMware vSphere is pretty stable.

VMware vSphere can be scalable. We can scale it as much as we want, but it could be more scalable. 

The initial setup is pretty good. It took us about an hour to implement this solution.

We implemented VMware vSphere. We need about two people to set up and maintain this solution.

We pay for our license. 

I would recommend this solution to new users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give VMware vSphere a ten.

The solution is typically used in different ways. For example, for different servers, we use a different version on the same physical servers. It's for consolidation on one hardware server. It's also used for redundancy, for fail order, for high availability, for the assistance of the system et cetera. It can also be used for a virtual classroom.

The solution has a high availability of features. 

They are very distributed and easy to use. 

The virtual card features are very good.

The REST is excellent.

Technical support is very good. They are very helpful.

The solution has been very intuitive. 

The product offers a very high level of performance.

You can scale the solution well.

I can't think of any particular features that are missing within the solution. It's quite complete.

There are occasionally bugs or errors.

Some customers are of the opinion that the pricing is too expensive for them.

I've been working with the solution for the last 12 months or so.

The stability is pretty good. In my experience, I see many different bugs or mistakes or errors in the different versions of VMware vSphere, however, they have a great software team. When you have some issues, you always get help from someone very quickly.

The scalability is very good on the product. It's pretty simple to scale up or down.

We have about 4,000 users that interact with it within the company.

We do plan to increase usage in the future if we need to.

The solution offers a very good level of technical support. We've always been able to get help when we've had issues. We're satisfied with the level of service they provide.

I've used Zen servers four or five years ago. I've also used Oracle VM in the past with a client.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex at all. If a company needs to set up the solution, they shouldn't have an issue doing so.

The plan for deployment matters. You should use a basic method of installation from a USB or some other hard drive or directly. It takes about 15 or 20 minutes. 

The cost varies from customer to customer. VMware offers various price policies, and therefore I'm unsure of how it differs from client to client.

We are a big IT integration company and we do around 80 projects for different customers in my country. We are a partner with VMware. We're one of their software vendors.

We use multiple versions of the solution.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Overall, we've been very satisfied with the solution and its capabilities.

Most use cases are here in Brazil. The company is moving to vSphere after exchanging from a legacy platform. Most of our clients have not previously considered digitalization. Now, they look up KVM solutions for DevOps, the Zain app, and Zain desktops for desktop visualization. For some clients, these alternatives may seem more enticing. We did a vSphere implementation for a customer in the last 12 months. I think it was version 6.5.3. We used it for a retail company. We also cater to small to medium-sized companies in the US market. I estimate about a hundred people use vSphere.

Visualizing infrastructure is a very important aspect of what we do. VMware vSphere is the benchmark of the visualization market. It's the go-to choice for about every customer that we deal with.

As we are a service partner, I think the most valuable feature vSphere has is the ability to visualize infrastructure. Other similar software does not have this capability.

The visualization market is likely going to adopt more features in the network aspect of the typical data center. It would be useful to have features like micro-segmentation, changing the mix as well as part of vSphere. This is not currently provided and to achieve this, you need the VMware NSX product, which is a different product with its own license. I think some sort of migration tool could be introduced to migrate to the cloud. It should include integrations with a hooked cloud environment, or on-prem and even between clusters. For example, sometimes I need to migrate a VM from a vSphere environment to a hooked cloud environment.

I have worked with vSphere for some years. My company has had a contract with Lenovo for about a year and a half. I am an IT professional. I work with VMware vSphere for our customers.

We are a value-added distributor for some partners like Lenovo. We re-sell vSphere as an end product. We are VMware partners.

vSphere is very stable.

It is very scalable as it is the visualization benchmark.

I don't remember engaging technical support for vSphere. I have not required support thus far for the product. The documentation is very good.

I had some issues with this installation, but not from the vSphere angle. We have to watch compatibility measures between the hardware we are using and other software. It's not a problem with vSphere itself. It's the basic compatibility that we must follow.

The license growth of vSphere depends on the growth of the visual environment and the addition of more hosts.

Although vSphere is still a very useful option for visualization, some clients are trying alternative DevOps solutions for less critical sites. However, they use vSphere as an option for visualization in production.

Just follow the documentation. It's very useful and informative. Before you implement, check the licensing, to see if the license is okay and the compatibility metrics are okay. I would rate VMware vSphere 9 out of 10.

Standard commercial environment.

A gold standard of server virtualization.

• vMotion
• NSX
• Dynamic deployment of new servers is critical.

Improvements to the vCenter server appliance are still needed, especially the HTML5.

I primarily use vSphere for management. It is very fast, responsive, and easy to use.

It has high clustering and availability features. These features are not found with other hypervisors.

I would like to see VMware head towards a more GPU friendly environment. 

The stability is high. 

I also have experience with Citrix ESXi.

The other options that we considered were Cisco, Dell EMC, and Nutanix. 

It is user-friendly and easy to use. 

We stopped using a lot of cloud services. However, I see that VMware has integrated with Amazon Cloud. We will now to have to move everything to the cloud. My goal is to uplift our environment to the cloud, which will be probably in two years, but it will happen. It is where everyone is heading, since it is the next big step.

It is very stable. Once you have it in production, there are rarely any issues, which is a nice thing about VMware.

It is highly scalable. We need to scale out and up, and we can do that with vSphere. We can easily add more storage, drives, or memory. 

I do not have any problems with tech support. It is very good. I usually start in-house, then outreach to VMware support if there is a need to do so.

It is easy to set up. Once you get it running, it doesn't break down. It just runs.

The deployment took a week to complete. I do not fault the solution, as it was our personal systematic issues that had to be dealt with internally.

ROI is hard to measure because it depends upon the customer's relationship with the solution and how much they spent on it.

VMware licensing and pricing are a bit more expensive compared to others, like Hyper-V. However, you get what you pay for.

We considered Hyper-V, but decided to go with VMware since there are certain applications which run better on VMware. 

Price is not everything to me. Even though price may put a burden on a company, if you are trying to solve something for your company, the more expensive solution may help you run your environment smoothly. Then, it is worth the expense. 

vSphere has been deployed in many of our customers. It improves drastically DC consolidation and proper use of available resources. At present, virtualised customers are still far from fully leveraging the potential of vSphere in part due to lack of expertise and fully understanding the concepts of virtualisation from an architecture point of view. It also improved resiliency and ease of asset management as most customers were able to reduce role segregation and have seen an opportunity for having DevOps since human resources became more available due to some degree of automation.

Having the ability to deploy fault tolerant VM’s with up to 4 CPUs is fantastic as it goes one level up from a business continuity perspective. Previously, VMware was covering, with just vSphere, backups and DR, and now it also covers a properly functional fault tolerant offering.

Single Sign On is another feature that is enhanced and solves much of the older problems, either in deploying or managing it. Cross vendor integration is in my opinion one of the best features. Although all these features are welcome and a must, they come at a price in terms of licensing.

I’d like to see a better web console or rather, transform the web console in a real single pane of glass for the whole infrastructure instead of having to go for vRealize Ops Manager. Other vendors are providing this already and vSphere (vendor) has that capability. I’d also like to see solutions such as vSAN in vSphere, really take off. It has a lot of potential and since it has been jointly done with other hardware vendors it somehow lost track of what the real purpose was, offer a whole very simple and very effective solution. Support for Virtual Volumes will be the next big thing, and although it is already implemented, it will take a while to see its light in production in customers.

The web client is sometimes slow and sluggish, other than that customers have no complaints around stability if the product is used as intended.

This is one of the strongest points in vSphere. I've had no problems with scalability. Although it is dependant on the underlying hardware infrastructure and its scalability/growth/space/etc.

Customer Service:

It's very good.

Technical Support:

Very good once you’re passed the initial “script-reading-far-far-away” operators.

My customers have used all available solutions. Some move to vSphere, some move away. In the end it will be about costs unless very well justified by a business need for high resiliency and market name.

Customers who move to or implement VMware are already aware and skilled on the implementation level. It is usually very straightforward.

My company or a partner company does the implementation. With the amount of available documentation and training, the is no excuse for a poorly deployed platform on vSphere. Know how on platform usage is a different story.

Considering the consolidation and virtualisation portion of it, for a Greenfield, very good. For brownfield and considering license costs and removing the benefits of virtualisation, it is an ROI nightmare, but focusing on the product itself vSphere delivers a good ROI, lower than competitors but still OK.

Start with the lowest and upgrade if, and only if, absolutely necessary. Customers will find that the standard edition is more than sufficient for their needs until they are internally ready to move forward to a cloud operating model.

All in the market. Hyper-V, KVM, Oracle VM, PowerVM, etc.

Start with the least expensive Licensing model and upgrade as you need. Change your operating model to virtualisation and fully leverage its potential. vSphere has it all in one package and can really change the way IT operates. We’re 12 years into virtualisation on x86 and I still find most of the virtualised customers not happy with what it offers since they don’t know how to utilise it.

Every organization that I know of that has wanted to implement virtualization in their environments wants HA with every virtual server. That's why for us, we've found the most valuable feature is the ability to move VMs between vCenters and fault tolerance within our four vCPUs.

I would also add that the vSAN feature was not useful beforehand but now with Hyper-Converged infrastructure it will simplify vSphere management as well as storage. We may be acquiring xRAIL from EMC which will definitely eliminate needs for storage as well as Fibre Channel switches.

The biggest advantage is that it cuts costs. A few years ago, I worked in an environment of all physical servers. It was very expensive to maintain high availability with them. vSphere cuts that cost.

No more lengthy physical server server restores. When this product is coupled with Veeam Backup and replication restoring whole virtual machine or individual files or active directory objects virtually happen in minutes.

I'd like to see small VMDKs in the next version since Hyper-V provides that option. Right now, that process with vSphere is still manual and requires downtime.

I have used this product for the last five years.

With previous versions, for example in 5.1, it was inconvenient to deploy an SSO database. Now, an SSO database is local and automatically installed.

It's highly stable.

It scales without issues.

The level of technical support depends on who you're talking to. Some people are more experienced than others. Overall, though, I'd rate them well, but they don't respond very quickly during the weekends.

I used Hyper-V, which worked well on a single server running Windows 2008 R2. But as soon as a cluster is configured, there are lots of issues with SCVMM. I've heard that Microsoft made some improvements and the product is now more stable, but VMware ESXi is based on the Linux OS and is much more stable. I've had to learn command-line code in Linux, but VMware is better than Microsoft.

It's very easy to set up because it's a popular product and there are many online articles. VMware articles are a bit dry. Many consultants post their experiences, making deployment of vSphere straightforward so long as it's planned properly.

I have implemented this product either from scratch or as part of an upgrade. One piece of advice that I would give is to make sure that the certificate is minimum 1024 bits (I forgot to check that). Other than that, an upgrade or set-up is very straightforward, especially with v6.